Special Features

Wii Fit: Bruised Boards and Balanced Egos

When the Japanese version of Wii Fit arrived in our offices, I was the person who ended up taking it home. Not because I was especially excited to "play" it; quite the contrary. I was most definitely curious about it, but I was more or less content to watch my co-workers engage in what I perceived to be an extended exercise in public humiliation (we work on the Internet, after all). The reason I took Wii Fit home is because my wife is the closest thing that GameSpy's editorial team has to a Japanese-fluent staff member. It sat in the box at home for a good week before I opened it up, as we as a staff figured out how exactly to cover it. I came into it expecting to set it up, have my wife translate the menu screens for me, and screw around with it long enough to write up a decent preview. In reality, well, let's just say that GameSpy is going to have a hard time getting back its Japanese Wii.

It's probably not as fun as it looks.

Not long after we booted up Wii Fit, the software told my wife she was fat. Mrs Hobbes feels my pain: she's an active, fit woman who, prior to Wii Fit, practiced yoga every night before going to bed. She eats well, goes outside a lot, and unlike myself, has a job that's reasonably physically-demanding. But BMI doesn't lie (unless you talk to critics of the statistical measure), and Mr. Balance Board informed Mrs. Lopez that she could stand to drop a few kilos. She mocked outrage, but ultimately took it in stride; we're grown folks for one, and according to her, this sort of forwardness isn't entirely unfamiliar to someone who grew up in the nurturing arms of Japan's national healthcare system. In any case, it was soon evident that something about Wii Fit's style of gentle-nudging/passive-nagging struck a chord in her. She was into it almost immediately.

Wii Fit ended up supplanting the nightly yoga exercises. She goes anywhere from 20 minutes to more than an hour, ever-mindful of how she rates at certain exercises, and actively pursuing improvement at ones that are difficult for her. In other words -- unless you count masochistic hardcore players who fixate on "challenge" in lieu of entertainment -- she isn't interacting with Wii Fit the way the we gamers interact with our games. Fun isn't the objective. At least not the primary one.